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We were fortunate enough to get a 30 day hardware trial before we decided to buy the Solidfire solution (this was just prior to NetApp's acquisition). Our main motivation for going to Solidfire at the time was driven by the attraction of QoS at the volume level. Our FAS array was always bottlenecked at the CPU as we added more and more drives. As a result we suffered heavily to "noisy neighbor" issues at the VM level no matter how much we tuned our VM environment. During our testing of the Solidfire array we simulated much of our production environment, being that we are primarily education, we ran several SCCM imaging cycles to test labs. When we got our results, we were stunned by how well the QoS worked. Eventually, we performed the same tests over and over, but this time we manually failed over node units, pulling drives out, ect. until we reached the arrays break point. It's incredibly resilient and simple to use. It took less than 45min (with zero training on the OS) to serve data once the nodes were booted up. It took longer to rack them up. It's a fantastic system!

As someone who works for an organization that just recently purchased (additional) storage for our Solidfire array; moving to an AFA has transformed our data center performance! In fact, our entire production environment is now running on flash. We are currently getting a 4.13:1 data reduction as well. Our previous array (FAS 2240-2) ran out of capacity and couldn't handle additional shelves, data reduction wasn't terribly great with ONTAP 8.x (7-mode). So we opted to scale-out rather than up. I'm curious where this price point is at compared to NetApp's Solidfire offerings. We love our Solidfire array, but did sacrifice useful ONTAP features to make the move, it has been very worth it, though. I was told by a NetApp rep that a 1-way SnapMirror is coming to Element OS very soon as a result of the partnership, which will be a great addition. Any chance you guys will be doing a Solidfire review and compare them to NetApp's traditional offerings?